Get Off Your Lazy Ass - Using the iPhone to Better Yourself

Get Involved

Anyone can find a hobby, but these apps make hobbies your own. Get tips and assistance with a subject close to your heart, or discover new worlds.

Plant a Garden

Plant a vegetable garden with guidance from Botanical Interests ($5.99, www.botanicalinterests.com). This app is affiliated with the online seed store, but never hard sells those products. Instead, it provides hundreds of entries, sorted by plant type, with climate-specific tips about how to get started and when to plant. For example, some entries suggest getting started indoors, while others tell you when to sow your seeds outside. Botanical Interests also explains how to prepare the garden soil, the best light for your plants, what to look for before harvesting, and more.

The seed-packet style of art hides all kinds of planting tips and details if you push the lower-right icon.

Knit Pick

If you’re knitting a single pattern--or managing multiple projects--you’ll need to keep track of your progress between breaks. ForgetMeKnit ($2.99, sites.google.com/site/kromsware) serves as this reminder. To set up a project, you enter the number, type, and order of stitches. Then just tap the screen to count down each purl, knit, and other stitch for your pattern. You can even keep track of concurrent projects and save notes about needles and yarn with each project.

Some of us knit, and the rest of us are envious.

Make a Meal

We were nervous to see a celebrity TV cook taking his show to an iPhone app (especially a 404MB one). But Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals ($7.99, www.jamieoliver.com/20-minute-meals) skillfully introduces fledgling cooks to their own kitchens. Just protect your iPhone from cooking splatter somehow, with a stand or even a clear plastic bag.

Instead of just giving recipes, the app teaches the basics so anyone can cook.

20 Minute Meals includes 50 recipes, but its success comes from many extra tips. For example, if your meal includes chopping and seafood, you’ll see videos about knife skills and how to buy fish. And the app can translate the recipe’s ingredients--and even kitchen equipment--into a shopping list.

Take Better Photos

Sure, Nikon is hoping that you’ll buy its cameras, but Nikon Learn & Explore (free, www.nikonusa.com) gives tips for any photographer. You’ll take better pictures with any brand of camera, be it point-and-shoot or DSLR.

Lessons range to all levels of photography, so even beginners can take better pictures.

Lessons range in difficulty, showing you how to improve zoomed photos, snap pictures at dusk, set the white balance, and more. A deep glossary explains hundreds of terms, and the image galleries provide inspiration as well as assistance: These professionally produced examples include details about when and how they were shot, so you can copy exposure settings in your own exploration.